Prospero=Patrick Stewart, good—I like it-- but in the ARCTIC?? Ariel is a dude?? A hot dude??
There was a time in my life when If I heard live music that deviated from the recording I had memorized I would have little immature hissy fits. That same sense of discomfort is awakened when movies don’t stick to the text. I still have a niggling worm of unease in the theatre when massive setting costume changes take place—for example Richard as a Nazi-- or as I anticipate Thursday—Julius Cesar in samurai garb?? THEY better not F THAT up!) But now I can see Ian McKellan as brilliantly terrifying and I am okay with the irony of the Assorted Lords scrabbling through the ice pack and discussing the lush green grass. It was funny.
I have always read Ariel in The Tempest as a little waif fairygirl with this disturbed angry old man. And the RSC has now pushed all of that imagery right out my window. We start out on Titanic shipwreck kinda thing and end up with Inuits and dead seals. “So people who think they're going to get an elderly man with a long white beard sitting on a rock, talking about his life, are in for a surprise.'' (Mckee A2 News)
The bizarre unfamiliarity of the frozen Arctic, coupled with a Peter Murphy-like Ariel and a Caliban who is drop dead gorgeous provided a magical if lusty--space for Shakespeare's last drama to unfold.
"Ultimately, it's a play about finding forgiveness in the most unlikely place,'' said Stewart. "For me, an act which resonates very powerfully ... is how much of a difference it makes to both the interior as well as the exterior life if you can, if only for a few minutes, put yourself in another's shoes, see the world through their eyes." The Tempest asks a single quiet question, one that Shakespeare has posed in many of his other plays and what Mr. Bloom just finished writing a book about-- What is a human being?
